Shotgun Alley Read online

  Now Mad Dog was astride his Low Rider, gripping the ape-hanger handlebars, hazy-faced with pleasure as he primed the throttle. Shorty and Steve brought down their Fat Boys and mounted. Charlie was swinging one rippling denimed leg over the seat of his Super Glide.

  Cobra was last down. The blonde bit her lip, waiting for him. He had a Heritage Softtail body chopped to the bone. Pure chrome nearly. Silver everywhere except the black seat and the tires. It looked to her like the living skeleton of a machine. The others were clapping half-shells on top of their heads, but Cobra drew down the visor of a full-faced helmet the same silver as the bike. He handed her a black one. As he kicked onto the saddle, she tucked her hair up into the helmet and pulled it down over a face like heavenly song.

  Cobra turned over the engine, throttled it to a roar. Then they were all roaring, all five cycles, roaring then sinking to a stuttering bluster that wiped out the birdsong and the freeway noise and everything. To the blonde they sounded like beasts in a jungle, a pride of beasts celebrating a kill. She felt the wild thrill of the sound in her chest and there were crazy flashbacks in her mind: the body jerking behind the wheel of the Camaro, the truck turning under her hands, the memory of gunfire. Breathless, she slipped onto the bitch pad behind Cobra and felt the throb of the machine between her legs.

  Cobra revved the Softail to a bellow. The other bikes bellowed back. Shorty’s Fat Boy reared like a stallion. Mad Dog wrestled the ape-hangers as the Low Rider wobbled wildly on its long front forks then settled down. They started rolling, down the street in a wedge, Cobra the spearhead, two bikes trailing on either side.

  They hit the corner as one and burst apart, fanning away from each other, accelerating to high speeds in an instant, disappearing in an instant from each other’s sight. That was the point of the location. There were freeways in all directions here. Minutes later, Steve and Shorty would be heading north on the 101. Mad Dog would be bound south on the 82. Charlie would be on the 84 westward. All of them in the wind and gone.

  Cobra headed straight for the bridge to the East Bay. Holding to his waist, looking back over her shoulder, the blonde kept the truck in sight the whole distance. She could still see it when they reached the on ramp. That’s when she let go of Cobra with one hand. She stretched her arm out behind her, pointed the garage opener back at the playground. She pressed the button.

  She let her breath go in a rush as the white truck blew. Even at this distance and over the roaring engine, she could hear the explosion. The dynamite torched the gas tank, and the van and the cab were ripped apart simultaneously in one great billowing ball of garish orange flame.

  Cobra laughed. She could feel it under her hand. She faced forward, held him tight again, rested her head against the back of his leather jacket.

  The bridge lay just before them, a long causeway stretched low across the surface of the bay. As they sped toward it, the road rose, slanting up and out of sight as if it were soaring right off the dazzling water into the sky. All along its side ran an endless rank of gracefully curving lampposts. When the blonde raised her eyes to them, she saw their heads bending sweetly down like the heads of flowers. For a moment, she had the thought that they were watching over her.

  Cobra and the blonde and the Harley rolled on together. They climbed higher and higher into the face of the rising sun.

  Part One

  The Case of the Prudish Professor

  One

  Two weeks later, a stranger walked into Shotgun Alley. It was a roadhouse on a shabby stretch of two-lane at the base of the Oakland Hills. The bikers liked to roll in after riding the canyons and Grizzly Peak. You curled down out of the winding forest lanes onto a half mile of flat highway lined with not much but gum trees, then there it was: a long, low, flat-roofed building of splintery redwood. Always a row of Harleys in the sandy lot in front. A spotlit sign up top with a pair of crossed shotguns painted on it. Made it look as if the place was named in the spirit of the old West. In fact, it was named for a thirty-year-old shootout in the garbage-can alley out back. Two Mexican mobsters had been blasted to death there by a trio of Hell’s Angels. Before that, the roadhouse was just called Smiley’s.

  Inside, Shotgun Alley was a broad, shadowy space so smoky and dark on a busy night you couldn’t see one end of it from the other. To the right as you came in, there was a small half-circle stage against the back wall for the bands that played on weekends and Wednesdays. A small half-circle dance floor lay beyond that. Then across the front of the long pine bar were the shellacked tables surrounded by slat-backed chairs. Finally, all the way to the left by the bathrooms, there was a place set aside for pinball and video games and pool.

  It was a bar big enough to handle trouble, in other words. You could knock back beers all night in here and never meet another man’s eyes. Some guy could get beaten senseless with a pool cue over by the men’s room and the girl taking off her T-shirt onstage would just keep dancing the whole time, unaware in the swirling smoke. There were outlaw riders around most nights, but for the most part it wasn’t a war zone. The gangs would just push their chairs together, drape their leather jackets over the backs patch outward, and no one even thought about walking through the barrier. What fights there were were brought on by the usual bullshit—old scores, women, some college kid mouthing off. Four or five bouncers patrolled the perimeter day and night to take care of that sort of thing.

  That said, there was one corner of the place that had a certain gnarly feel to it, an atmosphere, as if a killing were about to happen there, were always just on the brink of happening. It was the spot right beyond the far curve of the bar, along the wall past the pinball machines. It included maybe the last two or three barstools, a couple of tables, eight or nine chairs. A lot of the time these seats stood empty even when the rest of the place was packed. Other times Cobra sat there, and Mad Dog and Charlie and the rest and their old ladies. They weren’t a gang exactly; they had no patch of their own, no charter, they claimed no territory. But the bikers who were in gangs knew them, knew one or another of them at least, or had heard of some of them. They called them the Outriders, and they left them alone. Nobody went near them. Nobody went into that section of the roadhouse even when the tables were empty. No one even looked over there when they passed by to get to the bathrooms or the machines.

  No one, that is, until this stranger came in.

  It was early on a Wednesday evening, not sunset yet. There were drinkers at some of the tables, but a lot of the bikers were still out fucking around on the peak. A guitar-and-harmonica country band was rehearsing in fits and starts onstage. There’d be a burst of music from time to time, and then the players would lapse back into conversation. For the most part, Shotgun Alley was quiet.

  Cobra was at his table in the corner with the blonde he called Honey. Shorty was there, too, with his girl Meryl, and Charlie with a broad he’d been banging off and on named Selene.

  Anyone who cared could’ve heard the stranger’s Harley roar up outside. They could’ve heard it as its voice sank to a growl and quit. But no one cared.

  A few seconds later, the stranger himself pushed through the door. He stood easy at the edge of the place and looked around.

  He was a man with an air about him and a sense of himself: He was the hero of his own movie. By the looks of it right now, it was that western film where the gunfighter walks into the bar and the music stops and the cowpokes duck under the table because they know that trouble is coming. Trouble, it seemed, was what he was looking for as he paused there on the threshold.

  Physically, he was on the short side. Broad-shouldered, muscular. Handsome in the classical way with clipped sandy hair over a round face of fine features. When he took off his aviator shades, he had pale, nearly colorless eyes. He was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket. He was wearing an ironical expression, too, as if something struck him as funny. Or maybe everything struck him as funny—or maybe it all just struck him as too stupid not to laugh. />
  After he’d been standing there a while, the bouncers glanced up at him from their stations at the bar or amid the tables. They were about to glance away, but they glanced again instead and took a longer study of him. They cursed to themselves and wished he hadn’t come in. They’d seen that western movie, too. Hell, everyone in the place had seen that movie.

  The stranger went to the bar and quietly ordered a beer. Then he carried his drink over to Cobra’s table and sat down.

  Two

  Cobra was laughing. Honey was telling him a story about a boy she had dated. The boy was named Harold, and the story had a sort of refrain to it, a running gag, “But Harold had to call his boss.” Every time Honey said this, Cobra laughed long and hard. Honey made silly faces, too, and big gestures in her efforts to entertain him. Cobra found this adorable. Sometimes he stopped laughing and just listened to her, just looked at her very tenderly and brushed her blonde hair back from her face with his fingers. His gaze traveled down her and back up again. She was willowy in her jeans and pink T-shirt. She had silken blonde hair and deep blue eyes all soft for him. She was so beautiful, he thought, she seemed almost separate from the background of the world, seemed almost to glow off the surface of things like the angels in paintings. He kissed her—had to kiss her—in the middle of a sentence and then went on looking at her as she told the rest of her story.

  So for a moment or two after the stranger walked over, Cobra didn’t even realize he was there. He was laughing again. He repeated the punch line in unison with Honey, “But Harold had to call his boss!” He turned to reach for his beer. Noticed Shorty and Charlie staring, and looked around to see what the hell they were staring at. The stranger was just lowering himself into the seat at Cobra’s right hand.

  Cobra was a lean, leathery man roughly the same age as the stranger, somewhere between thirty, say, and maybe thirty-five. He had a craggy face, V-shaped, with sharp smile lines graven in the cheeks and brow. All his features were sharp. His chin was pointed, his lips thin, his nose aquiline. His once golden hair, now darkening, was swept back hard. His eyes were piercing, emerald green, and you could see how smart he was just by looking in them. He was plenty smart, there was no question about that. And not just smart, he’d had some college, too. Plus he still read books from time to time—he could reel off enough of the world’s wisdom to get himself a blow job, anyway, from girls who liked that sort of thing in their outlaws. How much deeper than that his wisdom ran it was hard to say.

  Anyway, he saw the stranger sitting down next to him. Gave him a long, grinning once-over, as in: What the hell do we have here?

  The stranger drew a pack of Marlboros from his jacket, drew a Marlboro from the pack with his lips. Torched it leisurely with a plastic lighter. Nodded at Cobra’s grin, still smiling that ironical smile.

  Cobra burst out with a short laugh. “Y’know,” he said, “that’s Mad Dog’s chair you’re sitting in.”

  The stranger took a slow drag on his cigarette. “Is it?” he said, and blew the smoke luxuriously into the gray air. “I guess he’s just gonna have to sit somewhere else, isn’t he.”

  Cobra turned to his buddies as if to say: You hear that?

  They’d heard it, all right. Shorty’s shaved head had gone red from neck to dome. And Charlie, with those piles of bouldery muscles on him, seemed ready to fall on the newcomer like an avalanche. Neither man was smiling.

  But Cobra smiled. He grinned; he went on grinning. All the sharp angles of his face, the crags, the lips, the eyebrows, arched upward. “You think so?” he asked the stranger. “I don’t know, dude. Mad Dog—he sure does love that chair.”

  “Yeah?” the stranger asked.

  “Oh, he’ll kill you for that chair, no joke.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you. He’s on his way over here right now, too.”

  “Is he? Well,” the stranger drawled, “I better talk in a big, frightened hurry then.”

  Cobra let out another laugh. “I guess you better.”

  But if the stranger was planning to talk fast, he sure took his sweet time about it. Smoked his cigarette some more. Took a meditative pull on his beer. Savored the mouthful. During all of which, the bikers and their women shared various glances of outrage, disbelief, and plain dumb wonder.

  “Aaah!” said the stranger as he finally swallowed. He cocked his head in appreciation.

  “Y’know,” Cobra said, “call it, I don’t know, a sort of sixth sense, but I’m guessing you don’t know much about Mad Dog.”

  “Not a thing, to be honest with you,” said the stranger. “The name kind of says it all, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, the name’s just the beginning, trust me.”

  “I get you.”

  “You get the picture?”

  “He’s a man named Mad Dog, and he loves his chair.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “So I’ll get down to business. Angel Withers sent me.”

  “Ah.” That caught Cobra’s attention. He thought it over. He squinched one eye shut and reached back to massage the space between his shoulder blades. “Angel, huh?”

  The stranger waited. He planted his cigarette in his ironical smile. Tilted his chair off its front legs, casual, holding his beer on one thigh. Sitting like that, he caught Honey studying him. He let his pale gaze rest on her—coolly, as if she were something he admired on a shelf, some pretty figurine or picture that he might decide to buy or then again not. Honey’s cheeks colored. She twisted her lips and smirked and looked away. She made herself busy helping Cobra massage that space on the back of his T-shirt.

  “This is the Angel Withers,” said Cobra then, shifting his shoulders under her hand. He sat forward, lacing his fingers in front of him, tapping his laced hands on the tabletop. “Angel Withers up in Pelican Bay.”

  “Was.”

  “That’s right, was.”

  “He died of the hepatitis about a year ago. Just before I got sprung.”

  “And before he died, he sent you to me.”

  “Since he died, I haven’t heard much from him.”

  “And he sent you why exactly?”

  The stranger shrugged. “He said it might make sense if we rode together sometimes. He said it might work out for both of us.”

  Cobra thought some more, rocked his head back and forth, considering. “Well. That’s interesting, I confess.”

  “I thought so.”

  “He was a good man, Angel.”

  “One of the best, if you were facing him.”

  Cobra studied the table, nodded. “Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” he said after a few seconds. “If he said it’d make sense for us to ride together, then I’m pretty sure it would. In fact, I have no doubt in my mind it would. If you were still alive, that is. Which it’s my sad duty to inform you that you’re not. Because here comes Mad Dog.”

  Three

  Charlie chuckled, watching Mad Dog cross the room. Shorty’s mouth opened like a black hole in his flushed bald head. The women—Honey and Meryl and Selene—shifted their bottoms in their chairs, excited at what was coming. The stranger, still casual, turned to look over his shoulder.

  Mad Dog was striding toward them. Truly, it was like watching some kind of thunder titan come, some kind of mythical giant who makes the earth tremble and the crops die. Legs the size of tree trunks, arms the size of legs. The right limbs swinging out in unison, then the left ones, as if it took the momentum of arm and leg together to keep his great bulk shifting forward. He was still wearing his leather, the zippers rattling. And he had a hammer clipped to his belt that tapped against his hip. His long dirty hair hung down into his short dirty beard, and those angel-dust eyes of his beamed out of the tangle.

  He smiled his broken smile at the sight of his friends. He didn’t even seem to see the stranger. It was as if the stranger weren’t there. As if the stranger couldn’t possibly be there, by all logic, because…well, because who w
ould sit where Mad Dog was supposed to sit?

  With a final thudding footstep that might well have shaken the roadhouse walls, the enormous biker was standing directly over the smaller man, and he still didn’t so much as look down at him.

  And then Cobra said, “Hey, Dog, this hole says you gotta sit somewhere else tonight. He’s taking your chair.”

  At that, Mad Dog did look down. He gazed dumbly at the stranger. Some kind of practical joke, he figured. He cocked a knowing glance up at Cobra and Charlie and Shorty, but they all had their poker faces on—they sure could be wily when they jived him. Well, he didn’t want to be a fuckhead about it, but he hated to be made a fool of. So finally he just gave a good-natured snort, grabbed hold of the back of his chair with one hand, and flicked the stranger out of it.

  As the stranger slid across the floor and smashed into the base of the bar, Mad Dog chuckled, shaking his head at the way his friends were always goofing on him.

  “You clowns,” he said.

  He resettled his chair and sat down. With a quick sweep of his beefy arm, he brushed the stranger’s beer and cigarette pack off the table. The shattering glass caught the attention of the barmaid. Mad Dog crooked his finger at her. Her face was a mask of terror and loathing as she scurried off to squeeze him a fresh brew.

  “So hey, what’s happening?” Mad Dog asked Cobra.

  The bikers and their women cracked up. That Mad Dog. What a character. Mad Dog drank in their admiration with a big goony smile and a bright twinkle in his lunatic eyes.

  Then the stranger kicked him in the head.

  It was that quick. No one had even seen him coming. No one had even bothered to keep an eye on him. They figured he’d just crawl away.